Qbox Story

NOTE: Please report any bugs you experience while using Qbox in the comments section below.

We released out beta 1.0 a little over 2 weeks ago, and have been busy identifying and catching both major and minor bugs with the site and player.  While it seems that the service is working properly for the vast majority of users, we do realize there still are some bugs that need to be addressed to make the service more robust.

One particular issue that was brought to our attention involves Firefox, where there is a connection failure between the browser and Qplayer.  When you click the play button on the website, you’re prompted with a message to download the player again (even if you’ve installed it already).  One possible cause for this is a corrupted registry, and it can be repaired as follows:

1.  Right-click on the Firefox icon and locate the directory where Firefox is installed.
2.  In my case, the directory is: “C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\”

C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\plugins\npqboxplugin.dll

This should fix the registry corruption issue, and when you restart Firefox, your Qplayer should be recognized by the browser.

We welcome your feedback, and would like to assure you that our developers are working around the clock to make your experience perfect.

Qbox was invited by Kevin Werback of the Wharton School to Supernova 2008 to be one of the early-stage startups to attend the event for free and also demo our product during the networking reception. It was a great opportunity for us to meet potential partners, users and investors.

Attending the conference from Qbox were Mickey and Bernard, both network partners of Qbox living in the Silicon Valley area. We have no real headquarters, and our people are literally located around the world even though we are a small early-stage venture. As a “network company,” we make the most use of web-based collaborative tools to work on projects across great distances.

Here’s a shot of Mickey eagerly pitching Qbox to one of the attendees. With some people, their energy and enthusiasm are just contagious, and Mickey is one of those guys.

Anyway, below are some key takeaways from the conference (from our perspective):

People generally really liked the ability to play tracks continuously from multiple social networks (and, of course, across different MySpace musician pages).

There was a lot of interest in our Emotional Link algorithm, the proprietary music recommendation engine.

In terms of the “wow!” factor, our Link-2-Music feature, which enables users to stream music from Google music search results and Wikipedia entries, won hands down.  We will be releasing this feature officially later this summer.

Bruce Houghton, president of Skyline Music LLC and prolific blogger for Skyline’s music industry blog Hypebot, has graciously invited us to tap into Hypebot’s collective intelligence.  Hypebot’s unique community of music and tech professionals will check out Qbox and share what they think of the Qbox service.

We want to hear your thoughts about your experience using our website and Qplayer. Please visit Qbox: A Test Of Hypebot’s Collective Intelligence and share your thoughts with the Hypebot community!  For your time and effort, we will give away Amazon gift certificates or donations to World Vision for children in Africa (in your name).

Indie music bands have been publishing their work through their MySpace musician pages ever since the social networking site became popular a few years ago.  The indie acts, in many ways, have to do this because MySpace provides an effective, affordable (as in free) channel through which they can reach out to their fans.

Artists’ dependence on MySpace, however, extends beyond just distributing their work online.  It is the social networking aspect of the experience that keeps them and their fans engaged.  Musicians can market to their fan “friends,” perhaps to turn some of them into True Fans.

It is estimated that 75% of MySpace visitors use MySpace to find music.  According to the Digital Entertainment Survey 2008, 52% of respondents stream music from social networks such as MySpace, Bebo, and Hi5.

There are other, perhaps easier, ways of finding and listening to music.  Why do it on social networks, then?  We believe the social networking aspect of consuming and discovering music on these sites drives these fans’ behavior.  Beyond simply consuming music, they want to interact with their favorite bands, make friends with the artists as well as other fans, and constantly keep themselves updated on their bands’ activities.  Musicians in turn use their online presence as an effective marketing channel, through which they not only promote their music but also sell concert tickets and pursue other revenue producing activities.

In the file-based download paradigm, the interactivity between fans and their musicians, and between fans and other fans, is inherently limited.  In the “social network music” paradigm, communication among artists and fans is the essence of the experience.

By indexing the entire music inventories on the largest social networks, Qbox makes it easy for users to seamlessly and easily search, organize and listen to all the music available across multiple social sites through one simple interface.  The music player from Qbox, the “Qplayer,” offers listeners a refined way to access on-demand as well as peer recommendation- and  genre- based streaming of over 21 million songs on sites like MySpace.com, YouTube.com, Bebo.com and other leading social networks.  Meanwhile, it is also a collaborative database of streaming music, continually edited and improved by users and artists.

Key features of Qbox’s streaming social network music service include:

• My Library — Users can easily collect (using the innovative “music clipping” feature) and organize songs scattered across the social web in their online Library.

• Genres — Songs are categorized by the 126 genres used on MySpace Music, facilitating easy access to new music by genre.

• Music Feed — Similar to Facebook’s extremely popular News Feed feature, the Music Feed feature allows users to view their friends’ music listening activities.

• Social network-based Recommendation — By analyzing musicians’ friend lists on MySpace, Qbox’s proprietary, behavior-based “Emotional Link” suggests new music based on predicted tastes, and expands music discovery by incorporating the entire MySpace user base into the recommendation algorithm.

• Link-2-Music — With the downloadable, browser-based Qbox Toolbar, artists and song titles in Google Music and Wikipedia can be converted to streaming music links instantly playable in Qplayer.

Initially, the social network music streaming service from Qbox is designed to provide music listeners a convenient way to find and enjoy music on social network sites.  In the near future, the service will expand to provide benefits to the artists who publish their work on social networking sites for their fans to consume.  Stay tuned…